Who was responsible for the ConWeb's worst reporting and craziest opinions last year? We honor those achievements.

Related articles on ConWebWatch:

Not even an outbreak of actual news can stop ConWebWatch's Slantie Awards from being handed out. It is the only award that pays tribute to the work of the right-wing media in the areas of bias, hatred, and just plain bad journalism. It remains the only award that recognizes the work of right-wing media, yet they don't seem to want to acknowledge it. We can't imagine why.

Well, whatever. Let's get down to business, shall we?

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The first award is for the most egregious example of bias in "news" coverage. Among this year's contenders: WorldNetDaily's attempt to pretend it never made allegations about Barack Obama's birth certificate or questioned his citizenship and cares only about his "eligibility"; the ConWeb's full embrace of the repeatedly discredited claim that Obama's trip to India and Asia cost $200 million a day; the Media Research Center's "Tell The Truth!" campaign, which applied to everyone but itself; WorldNetDaily reporter (and previous Slantie winner) Aaron Klein's increasingly desperate and false attacks on Supreme Court nominee Elena Kagan; Accuracy in Media's Cliff Kincaid and WorldNetDaily's Molotov Mitchell endorsing state executions of homosexuals in Uganda; and Newsmax's violation of journalistic ethics by slanting its news coverage to promote a candidate in the Republican primary for Florida governor, Bill McCollum, without disclosing that Newsmax CEO Christopher Ruddy held a fundraiser for McCollum's campaign -- then, after McCollum lost to Rick Scott in the primary, flip-flopping to promote Scott in the general election while all the mean things it wrote about him during the primary went down the memory hole.

But in the end, there was one clear winner: The Media Research Center's attack on a gay-themed art exhibition at a Smithsonian museum. It was so clearly a manufactured story -- CNSNews.com reporter Penny Starr had attacked two previous Smithsonian exhibits, then trolled congressional leaders to obtain a response to goose the story along -- yet it managed to gain traction, helped in no small part by MRC chief Brent Bozell's invocation of homophobic stereotypes of gays as deviants. The fake controversy actually got a tangible result: the Smithsonian pulled from the exhibit a video with an 11-second clip of ants crawling over a crucifix that Bozell and crew deemed blasphemous while ignoring the artist's intent in creating that image. In the end, nobody was happy -- art patrons threatened to pull their support for the Smithsonian for the removal, and Bozell demanded that Congress cut the Smithsonian's funding over the exhibit (never mind that the exhibit itself wasn't funded by the government).

All this because the MRC was gunning for the Smithsonian and wanted a place in the day's news cycle for its manufactured controversy du jour.

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The next award is the LoBaido Award for the silliest statement made by a writer for a conservative news Web site (named after Anthony LoBaido, who wrote a post-9/11 column for WorldNetDaily that was so unhinged -- he blamed the attacks on America's immorality since "all that is evil in the world can be found in New York" and, for good measure, called Hillary Clinton "openly Marxist, treasonous and abortion-mongering, occultic" -- that WND eventually pulled it from its site). And we have a bumper crop of nominees to choose from (with a mere two portrayals of Obama as a rapist):

Every time you mention something blacks, even if you're right and 100 percent right, and even if you're insulting the whites, somehow the blacks are the ones offended. This is perverted, this is sick, this is deranged, and this need that black people have to make you feel that you're a racist is a power trip. It's a phony power trip to make you feel that somehow you're destined to be the bosses and they have to serve you and cater to you and they have to be humbled in front of you and humiliated in front of you and they have to be eating humble pie for the rest of their lives just because they're white.

We don't need this kind of racism anymore. This is a racist society against whites, and black people should stop intimidating the whites when there's nothing involved and there's no excuse for it, and it's a fraud and a fake and a phony power trip. Give up the whole idea of racism unless you want to talk about how the white people are the ones suffering from it, not the blacks. You got that? That's it.

Abe Foxman has come out against a great and wonderful friend of the Jews, Rush Limbaugh.

That is bad enough, but it is symptomatic of a deeper problem: I have for years derided Jews in America and the Jewish lay leadership for tolerating and supporting clear and present enemies of the Jewish people among our senior ranks. It is a sickness of the soul.

The liberal Jew worships at the church of human secularism. These lost souls are married to their liberal dogma.

His name should be changed to Barack Hugo Obama. If he gets his agenda passed and implemented, Cleveland, Ohio, will look more like Caracas, Venezuela. It is said, "Imitation is the most sincere form of flattery." Mr. Chavez must be so proud of his protégé.

"Fatal Attraction," the Washington version is playing on a television near you as Obama's bipartisan summit on healthcare approaches. Like a possessed, rejected maniac the president refuses to allow the idea of a massive restructuring of our healthcare system to fade.

You're just not that into his healthcare bill? Too bad. He won't be ignored.

The spectacle of a far leftist president literally forcing socialized medicine down the throat of an unwilling center-right America is reminiscent, perhaps more than any other contemporary metaphor, of date rape.

A man determined to have his way with a woman may start off seducing her with lies, flattery and the usual pretense of caring about her. But at a critical moment, when she says, "Stop, I'm not comfortable with this and don't want to go any further," he has a choice: Either do the right thing and back off, or abandon all prior pretensions and take her by force.

As president, Barack Obama courted us with sweet talk, but America grew increasingly uncomfortable with his advances and firmly said, "Stop"  in fact, screamed bloody murder for months. Yet Obama remains obsessed with forcing himself on America.

We don't want to have a president who lies like Hitler and who has the killing of human beings in the womb of their mothers on his political platform  and who, together with his accomplices Reid and Pelosi, is working to make us, our children and our grandchildren slaves of the godless global socialist/communist establishment. What else could be the reason for his not listening to the people, spending trillions of dollars on nonsense and refusing to present his birth certificate?

If President Barack Obama gets his trillion dollar healthcare bill passed this week by the Democrats in Congress, parents will be required to pay for their unmarried kids' healthcare coverage until the age of 26.

And Generation Y will be enticed to continue slacking, without a job, well past college graduation. While ski bums everywhere are cheering the news that the federal government will be forcing parents to pay for their health insurance through age 26, parents are questioning why the federal government is enticing a whole generation to stay unemployed.

On March 21, 2010, a day that will live in infamy, our beloved constitutional republic came to an end. Its murder was committed by a slim majority in the House of Representatives by socialist Democrats who have given us a new form of government: state socialism. By that vote, the great legacy of freedom given us by our Founding Fathers was thrown on the trash heap. And the man most responsible for making this happen is the socialist despot in the White House, Barack Hussein Obama.

We can now say with nothing less than certainty that Barack Obama absorbed every word of his America-hating preacher in the church he and his wife attended for 20 years. He lied his way into the White House with the help of socialist Democrats who admire Fidel Castro more than they do George Washington.

And so, Barack Hussein Obama will go down in history as having achieved what no one believed an elected American president could ever achieve, the destruction of our constitutional republic. He joins that freedom-hating pantheon of philosophers and despots like Karl Marx, Vladimir Lenin, Josef Stalin, Adolf Hitler, Mao Zedong, Fidel Castro, Pol Pot and other such political leaders who led millions of people into slavery and death.

If Americans can find the courage to consciously reject the myth of the melting pot and expel the Mexicans from the American Southwest, the Arabs from Detroit and the Somalis from Minneapolis, they can reclaim their traditional white Anglo-Saxon Protestant culture. This is highly improbable because so many descendants of that culture have rejected it in favor of the vibrancy of diversity while those who haven't are far too frightened of criticism and social rejection to even articulate their thoughts.

Right now feminists are celebrating the 50th anniversary of the Pill, lauding its effects and congratulating society for allowing women to act like rutting cattle. See how far we've advanced in the past half-century?

The MASH television spectacle of Corporal Klinger wearing women’s dresses to get out of the military may now give way to the Pentagon actually permitting transgendered male soldiers to openly wear women’s military uniforms. This is what repeal of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell,” could mean.

From the way he walked to the way he talked, Bush was the butt of constant derision by the press. Every action he took to protect America was portrayed as a sinister plot.

Bush’s pronunciation of “nuclear” was cause for constant tittering in the media. In fact, pronouncing the word NOO-kyoo-ler is a Southern rendering similar to Jimmy Carter’s NOOK-ee-yuh. The Merriam-Webster Dictionary lists the way Bush pronounced nuclear as an alternate, even including that version in an audio clip on its website.

And to conservatives, the troubling aspects of the game aren’t confined to the pros. Soccer requires comparatively little from children but the ability to run after the ball  the risk of failure for anyone except maybe the goal keeper is zero. Even the strong chance that any given game will end in a tie makes it attractive for parents reluctant to impart life’s difficult lessons to young kids.

[Stephen H.] Webb wrote in First Things that, “Sporting should be about breaking kids down before you start building them up. Take baseball, for example. When I was a kid, baseball was the most popular sport precisely because it was so demanding … you had to face the fear of disfigurement as well as the statistical probability of striking out. The spectacle of your failure was so public that it was like having all of your friends invited to your home to watch your dad forcing you to eat your vegetables.”

In short, a powerful component of character building is missing from youth soccer, an important component of character is missing from pro soccer, and a sense of purposefulness is missing from the entire sport.

Our soldiers and Marines are dying because we put a fool in the White House; perversity is being increasingly glorified in federal policy for the same reason. We did it; we must fix it, with God's grace and help.

San Francisco recently celebrated its 40th annual gay parade. Seriously, homosexuals, you want us to believe that you're trustworthy, safe, upstanding pillars of the community, and you dress up like this? America, would you let this babysit your kids? Much less adopt a kid?

If you answered yes to either of these questions, you're GAAAAYYY! -- and walking proof that homosexuality is a mental disorder.

And if you suffer from this particular disorder, you're probably conflicted over a recent "SNL" skit that portrays homosexuals as the opposite of normal. Specifically, this skit juxtaposes Midwestern family values against New York gay bars with fetish. Not cool, "Saturday Night Live" -- making fun of people with mental disorders is not funny.

Right now, a year and a half after Barack Obama's election as president, many Americans are experiencing what I experienced a second and a half after being confronted by an armed robber. Maybe in the broad sweep of history, years are like seconds. Or, perhaps we've all just been so indoctrinated and confused by leftist education, media and culture that it takes a while to recognize a smiling revolutionary for what he really is. In any event, for millions of us, the two seconds of denial and wishful thinking are ending as we approach the November midterms, while finally coming to grips with the outrageous reality staring us in the face:

We're being robbed. Though we've tried in vain to view what's happening as something other than what it is, the truth is, our wealth, our liberty, our lives, our happiness  and our country itself  are being stolen. If you think that's even a slight exaggeration, you really haven't been paying attention.

I think I've finally figured out who Obama really is. Not his identity and citizenship, which  unlike any other president in history  remains a mystery. No, I mean who he is. Here's a very brief biography:

"Smeagol's original name was Trahald, the Anglicized equivalent of which is Smeagol. ... In the day of his ... coming of age, he went fishing with his cousin Deagol. While fishing, Deagol saw something glittering under the surface of the water, dove in after it, and came up with a glittering gold ring. Before even knowing the qualities of the beautiful ring, Smeagol's desire to own it overtook him. ... He soon developed many undesirable qualities, like stealing, eavesdropping, and being sneaky whenever he had the opportunity. ..." (TheOneRing.net)

Smeagol, of course, is Gollum, the pathetic creature in "The Lord of the Rings" who lived underground with the one ring that held the power over all the others. The ring consumed him, and in the end destroyed him. (Even if you disagree with this analogy, you must admit to the physical similarities between Gollum and Obama, no?)

A world away from her husband's dirty little war was the first lady's ostentatious sojourn to Spain. I must say that the Marie Antoinette metaphor for Michelle did not do it for me. Despite the motorcades and the session with the Spanish monarchs at their Marivent Palace  the mental imagine that I got was made in America; it came from reality TV or MTV. Shades of the shows "Pimp my Ride" and "Cribs" came to mind. Coloring my imagination was a vivid, prior mental image of the "sedate" soiree the first lady held for Mexican President Felipe Calderon, down to the disco ball and the half-nude, pelvis-grinding Beyonce. (Bibi Netanyahu was confined to the cellar.)

This isn't easy to write. It's not fun to say. It's virtually unthinkable to realize and acknowledge.

While the controversy still rises and rages on, around the proposed "Cordoba House" mosque and Muslim cultural center right on the edge of Ground Zero, where the World Trade Center stood till Sept. 11, 2001  there is a world-famous building, dedicated by its current residents to similar purposes, in the middle of Washington, D.C.

Some people think I was born in Hawaii. Others think I was born in Indonesia. I really don't know, but I'm glad that I stayed in America. Indonesia is a scary place, and I never could have been president over there. I never really knew my father. My mother said he was a great man. My grandparents didn't think so highly of him. I really don't know, but I wrote a book about him.

Some people say I'm black. Others say I'm mixed race. Some people say I'm not black enough. Others say I hate white people. My mother didn't like white people even though she was white. My grandparents didn't like black people even though liked me. I really don't know what I think, but I used a lot of drugs in high school trying to figure it out. White girls always liked me, but I didn't really like them.

Another of my late grandmother's many sayings was: "Sometimes it's hard to tell which is worse  the smell from the pile in the pasture or the flies it draws." Thus, in 21 words, she summed up my thoughts, feelings and disgust for the Obamas and their view of America.

In 1978, 912 members of the People's Temple, a predominantly African-American cult formed in San Francisco by Jim Jones, were either murdered or voluntarily committed suicide in Jamestown, Guyana. Those who committed what Jones referred to as revolutionary suicide drank Kool-Aid laced with cyanide. Many who refused to take their own lives were shot. Interestingly, Jim Jones was a community organizer who chided his subjects as they faced death, telling them that crying was not appropriate because that was not how socialists or communists should die.

Does the term community organizer ring a more contemporary bell? Does the odor of socialism taint today's political atmosphere?

Our nation is being led down the path to a contemporary Jonestown by another former community organizer who was trained and indoctrinated by yet another community organizer, Saul Alinsky, a deracinated Jew and a self-described "rebel" who dedicated his life to trying to destroying the economic and social system in America, a system he believed to be oppressive and unjust.

In case you missed it, Obama removed the reference to the "Creator" when he quoted a portion of the Declaration at a meeting of the Congressional Hispanic Congress.

Obama said, "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, endowed with certain inalienable rights: life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness."

But the actual quotation reads: "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness."

So the next time you women see an ad featuring an emaciated, skeletal chick, remember gay men find that attractive, not real men. Men, do not do this, but women, you could borrow a copy of Maxim. Those are the figures men prefer, not the gay Ralph Lauren fantasy that we've all been sold. So be healthy, exercise and ignore the Madison barrage because you are a woman. Be a woman. Don't be anything else.

And for you men who bought into the waif campaign: wake up! You're living a gay man's fantasy, man! You're the ones who are supposed to be hard and tough and straight. So start jogging, start a martial art, and tell your ladyfriends that they are beautiful. Because I don't let pedarasts dictate my definition, and neither should you.

I also just can't help but be amazed that Obama has done nothing personally to help his destitute relatives in Kenya or here. I'm glad that he feels a sense of compassion for them. But doesn't he have the material wealth to aid them himself? Has he done so? Can he show us through that example how transferring wealth results in long-term success? If it doesn't work on a personal basis  family member to family member  why does he expect it to work through the coercive power of government?

I think you know where I'm going: He doesn't expect it to raise the standard of living in those foreign countries. That's not even the point. The point of these programs is to lower the standard of living right here in the U.S. That's his goal.

But in the last two years, this pride has turned to deep-seated resentment and horror  as we have witnessed Obama seemingly favoring his own race and true religious allegiance over whites, Christians and Jews. On the eve of the congressional elections of 2010, when most experts predict that Obama's Democrats will lose control of at least the U.S. House of Representatives, it has become increasingly clear to not only tea partiers, but also most of the white Judeo-Christian electorate, that President Obama is not a ruler for all of the people, but rather "his people."

If Obama and his comrades genuinely wish to restore economic health and prosperity to America, they would resign even if they win on Tuesday.

The stock market would probably surge by 5,000 points within days of a mass resignation by left-liberal Democratic rulers. Foreign investment money would also flood into America.

[...]

Democrats ought to lose in 2010 and 2012, but they also need to be removed from power for at least two generations, as Republicans were from control of Congress from the 1930s to the 1980s.

For their redemption and ours, left-liberal Democrats need to wander for 40 years in the desert until they purge themselves of the pagan pseudo-religious cults of Eurosocialism, Marxism, progressivism and all other collectivisms.

In year 2050 Americans can reconsider whether the Democrats have again become an American political party.

Every American this week should take a vow never to vote for any Democrat until 2050.

While Americans' attention is riveted on fierce midterm battles and the subsequent power struggle in response to Barack Obama's attempted socialist revolution, a second stunning coup  one every bit as dangerous to the nation  is rapidly progressing toward victory with almost no notice or publicity.

For the past two decades, the powerful "gay rights" lobby has been crusading tirelessly to promote special legal rights for homosexuals, indoctrinate the nation's schoolchildren with their worldview, radically redefine the institution of marriage, repeal the U.S. military's time-tested rules of conduct, intimidate and discredit any and all critics, and  perhaps worst of all  criminalize and punish the open expression of Judeo-Christian moral beliefs.

This highly coordinated effort, once extremely controversial but today basically greenlighted by politicians and the press  including key conservatives  is rapidly advancing toward total victory, after which any return to Christian morality in American law and culture will become almost impossible.

This extraordinary under-the-radar blitzkrieg is the focus of the November issue of WND's monthly Whistleblower magazine, titled "AMERICA'S 'GAY' OBSESSION."

To be honored as one of Glamour magazine’s “Women of the Year,” a woman must have made a huge impact, changed the world for good, broken boundaries, stereotypes, etc. Except when she doesn’t. Sometimes all she needs to do is complain to the ACLU that her high school is refusing to let her bring a lesbian date to prom.

Constance McMillen, a high school senior in Fulton, Mississippi, received national attention this past spring when her school rejected her idea to come to prom, in a tuxedo, hand-in-hand with her girlfriend. McMillen reported Itawamba Agricultural High School to the ACLU, and was heralded as a hero by prominent lesbian activists such as Ellen Degeneres and Melissa Etheridge. When asked why McMillen deserved to be honored as one of Glamour’s “Women of the year,” Etheridge (a 2005 Glamour WOY winner) said, “She stood up and said, ‘This is who I am.’ When someone does that, it changes the world. It gives hope.”

McMillen was honored among truly great women that did significantly more than display stubbornness at a young age and wreck everyone else’s prom.

During World War II, America launched a "de-Nazification" campaign to try to erase Hitlerism from the hearts and minds of German POWs. We could now use a de-liberalization campaign. My friends know the ugly truth about me. I'm not really a conservative. I'm a liberal in remission. I speak their language.

We then have to ask ourselves: Was our president paid off by Islamic foes to bow down and pander to them and their professed radical religion? Only time will tell, but I for one am not going to rock back in my easy chair and not try to get to the bottom of this outrage.

Like the sorority girl who fell asleep drunk, awakening to an opportunistic frat boy peeling her clothes off, Americans let their guard down in a big way. Fortunately, the fear roused us from that torpor and insensibility, and we were able to fend him off before the deed was done. But we have a responsibility now to determine that he doesn't have the opportunity to harm anyone else.

Voting for people to govern other human beings is, at best, a questionable and corrupt activity  an activity that is all about lies, smear campaigns, money, pandering, bribery and thugs trying to intimidate voters with nightsticks. But if we must elect officials to govern us, I would go much further than just repealing the 26th Amendment.

I'd like to see an amendment that would require voters to be at least 30 years of age. Even though research indicates that the brain is fully developed by age 25, you have to give a newly formed adult brain a reasonable period of time to experience enough life to be in a position to shed itself of the bad habits it has developed over a period of 25 years. This is particularly true if a young adult has gone to college and been fed large doses of misinformation about history, economics and the Constitution.

The Obama administration has now engaged in a systematic campaign of terror against those that refuse to be submitted to an illegal search of their person by way of the invasive porno scanners. The punishment for not obeying the federal government is the humiliating experience of having to undergo a sexual assault as TSA thugs grope traveler's genitalia. There have been repeated instances of little children being sexually molested by TSA agents, the elderly being traumatized and the chronically ill being humiliated.

The difference between calling Obama an anti-colonialist, a socialist, or a Marxist mentored by a top operative of the CPUSA is that one category should immediately earn you an FBI investigation. Former FBI agent Max Noel says the Bureau used to investigate candidates for federal employment by analyzing Character, Associates, Reputation, and Loyalty to the United States. The first letters in those words make up the acronym CARL.

Obama could not have been elected president if he had been subjected to the CARL test. Leaving [Frank Marshall] Davis aside  and he was on the FBI’s “security index”  Obama’s relationship with communist terrorists Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn was enough to disqualify him for the presidency.

A happy home is one in which moms teach their daughters how to cook tasty meals for their future families and dads teach their sons that one of their roles in family life is drying the dishes and otherwise doing chores around the house to lighten mom's burdens.

Finally, women should understand and act on the time-honored truth that the fastest route to a man's heart is through his stomach, and not always through the drive-in window at the nearest fast-food restaurant. That's one way we can begin to put the family  and America  back together.

No, there's no question that, like the tragic election of Barack Obama, God is giving America what we apparently want. And even though the recent November election promises us relief in early 2011, like all disasters, there's still the interim clean-up of the wreckage. But can this mess be cleaned up?

Now it's a toss-up as to which movement will take down our country first: radical Islam via creeping Shariah, or the Christ-hating left with a lavender military in the lead.

During the 2008 election campaign, Barack Obama repeatedly informed the American people that he would call on the country's best minds to advise him. "You know," he told an audience back in May 2008, "my attitude is that whoever is the best person for the job is the person I want."

Too bad he thinks the best person for the job of secretary of defense is a bisexual, drug-addled talentless Auto-Tune creation with a relentlessly annoying fan base -- full of faux-profound morons who think that fashioning one's hair into a telephone qualifies as high art.

And the winner is ... Joseph Farah accusing Obama of deicide. Farah is no stranger to accusing presidents of murder -- witness his trying to blame Bill Clinton for the death of Vincent Foster -- but claiming that Obama is trying to kill God is not just insane, it's actually the only choice he had. So what will he accuse the next Democratic president of killing? It's harder to go higher than God on the food chain.

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Our final award is the Slantie Award for Career Achievement in Conservative Bias. This goes to a reporter or commentator with a consistent record of biased and slanted reports that fly in the face of time-honored journalistic practice, the truth and/or common sense.

And the winner is ... WorldNetDaily's Chelsea Schilling. As near as we can tell, Schilling is no longer a WND employee -- she hasn't written a bylined article since July -- yet she remains on the WND masthead as of this writing. For someone who wrote for WND for a little over two years, Schilling racked up an impressive list of misleading claims and falsehoods, as ConWebWatch detailed. For instance:

She promoted discredited claims from people who are also 9/11 truthers.

She suggested that Sarah Palin, while mayor of Wasilla, Alaska, was correct to make rape victims pay for police evidence-collection kits because they include "emergency contraception."

She wrote a sycophantic profile of birther queen Orly Taitz, and when Taitz got into a dispute with the former manager of her website, Schilling told only Taitz's side of the story.

She smeared a teacher who had lent a "banned book" to a student by suggesting the teacher intended to molest her students.

She baselessly claimed that CBS was "showing bias toward Barack Obama" by removing a David Letterman top-10 list critical of Obama from its website. Even the Media Research Center couldn't keep silent about that error.

Even more amazing than Schilling's record of shoddy journalism was that WND made no effort whatsoever to correct her errors. These falsehood-ridden articles remain live and uncorrected on WND's website. Schilling may be gone, but her reign of error will live forever.

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That concludes the evening's festivities. We'll be back this time next year to hand out some more hardware, whether or not there's actual news going on.